Driving Thread {Posts pulled from What were you thinking thread}

[ParallelLines]

@JKellyMap

I get it, but part of the problem is the utterly useless title of that thread. It’s much easier to innocently hijack (or, more often, contribute to a digression) when the title of the thread seemingly can allow for just about anything.

So, I’m being mindful that I’m probably defensive over my title choice - I think I’m balancing for bias, but I’m also probably going to give all benefit of the doubt. So feel free to consider my position partisan in all this!

First, you’re not the first to take me to task on this!

What were you THINKING?

Yeah, it’s right there in the OP. It’s not at all “right there in the OP” title. “What Were You Thinking?” With that title it could be about absolutely anything. What were you thinking using such a horribly non-descriptive thread name?

What were you THINKING?

I was thinking of a name that reflected the threads intent: something you would say to a poster that hadn’t earned a dedicated Pit thread but went off the rails. And thus I laid out in the OP. The fact it’s that title, but in the PIT (and I ran it by Miller to make sure it wouldn’t fall afoul of our back-link issues) I thought it would be useful when such back-links appear.

What were you THINKING?

Eh, it’s always a challenge when it comes to the Pit. Most of my Pit threads that I’ve started have been super descriptive - this one was challenging, and I suggested it as a title in the Ur-Troll thread, as a way to keep rants directed at posters who weren’t trolls from taking over for days. You’re correct in that it is my assumption that anyone who came -here- was already conversant with the expectations there, but -meh-. I accept your complaint about it as entirely appropriate for this thr…

So the title was a compromise, and was initially with the assumption (which for many of us should be a big WARNING sign) that most of the posters would be posters who were frequent users of the Trolls thread and know the context. The biggest issue was trying to find a way to address dissatisfaction with an individual poster in a non-Pit thread without falling afoul of our Pit title rules. NOTE - not as a back way around said insult issues, but to express disbelief in what a otherwise normal poster has posted.

And I laid that out pretty clearly in the OP of the THINKING thread. Though I did put in a few posts to further discuss the intent.

So, yeah, it’s a compromise. And for people that only read the title, without reading the OP, it’s going to be confusing, which is probably inevitable when it Pops to the top of the recent threads and it’s this long already.

If someone has a good idea that preserves the intent, while making it more clear, that would be fine. We could even do a modification that preserves the title like “{ for questionable one-off posts}” but I do think it would start to head into an insulting title issue again.

Really and truly, I wanted a thread where we could call someone out on one-off moments, discuss what the hell was going on without dragging the Trolls thread, or the originating thread off topic. Thus my comment moved to this thread and similar in the THINKING thread:

@ParallelLines

-smells the air of mutual respect and reasonable disagreement-

Ah, that’s the stuff. Bracing!

Calling someone out in the Trolls thread is an insult, duh. Calling someone out in a dedicated Pit thread may or may not be an insult, though it almost always is. Calling someone out in THINKING is meant to be a place to call someone out and figure out WTH was up with that poster in that moment without derailing other threads.

So yeah. Feel free to bring up new or amended title in the THINKING thread and I’ll absolutely consider it, though I’ll still ask @Miller to weigh in on the appropriateness.

[ I’ll put a link to this post in the THINKING thread so I’m not hijacking the hijack ]